As you might have noticed, this place has become a little dead in past couple of months. I haven’t been able to post regularly on Blogging Bits due to my involvement in several other web projects plus some unproductive circumstances in my life. And as much as I want to get back to blogging, it might not be possible for me to do so for another month or two.

So for now, in order to keep things fresh, I’m opening the doors of Blogging Bits to guest bloggers.

If you want to reach 700+ subscribers, send me your post or post idea to the.syed {at} gmail.com. If your post is published, you’ll be given proper credit at the start of the post with a permanent link to your blog. Or we can discuss the detail in email.

Thank you for your interest, and thank you for being a reader of Blogging Bits!

In my previous post I asked everyone if they made money blogging, and not surprisingly, majority of commenters replied in the negative.

The reason why many, or should I say most, people don’t make money from blogs is that most of the easy ways to effectively make money from blogging are considered somewhat bad, unethical, user-unfriendly and so on.

So bloggers who have worked hard to build a community around their blog, stay well away from money making practices that may harm their reputation and put off their readers. They happily choose the community over money.

I, too, fall in the same category of bloggers. I could run AdSense and plethora of other types of ads to monetize my blog, but I consider this to be bad from user experience perspective as well as an ineffective monetization strategy.

Ineffective? Sure, in my case, my readership consists mainly of bloggers and web masters who are pretty tech savvy and immune to advertisements. They either ignore the ads, or are turned off by them because they come here for information, not to see ads, especially when they can tell an ad from the real content.

So if you are one of the bloggers who don’t make money blogging, here’s good news for you. You don’t have to monetize your current established blog with evil ads to make money. There are other ways to make money from blogs. Some of these are really tough ones. For example, creating a product and selling it on your blog, or using your blog to promote your expertise a.k.a services.

The good news is that you don’t have to use any of the above methods to make money from blogs. Instead, take a look at the following ways.

It may seem like a a strange question, but do you really blog for money? Will you stop blogging if you don’t make money with your blog?

When I started this blog, I wanted to make money from it. But slowly, as time passed, my perspective changed. My blog became my identity, and people who read me (yes, you!) became my friends.

Now I don’t blog for money. I blog just to share my take on different issues in internet marketing, blogging, and web design world. And I really love doing it.

Note: I’m not averse to money. And I certainly wouldn’t reject it if a money making opportunity arises!

In my observation, most bloggers start blogging for money, but as time passes and they don’t make more than a few pennies, they either give up, or persist – just for the fun of it!

Those who persevere, gain new insights into their target market, and actually find out how to monetize their blog, directly or indirectly. Those are the ones who really make money blogging, and become an inspiration for a new generation of bloggers.

Well, see, I’m still here. And I don’t make money from blogging (though in my case, it’s intentional). I’m in the second phase of blogging.

Now the real question (and please answer) Do you make money blogging? What phase are you in? How long have you been blogging? Do you plan to keep on blogging no matter what?

Have got an idea? Want to do something? Then do it. You’ll not get very far by just thinking about it. You’ll get nowhere by not doing it.

The biggest impediment in the way of everything we don’t achieve is the lack of courage to actually do it. Heck, we can’t even fail if we don’t attempt to do it.

When it comes to blogging and working online, most of us tend to be passive learners. It’s easy to read all the information and feel all wise and knowledgeable, but any information that is not put to any use is, well, useless.

In fact, I read two kinds of books/blogs/anything readable. 1) That is practically useful. 2) That is absolutely useless but has high entertainment value, e.g. fiction.

The problem starts when I read something that I mean to read for its practical value, but instead I reduce its value to mere entertainment. Reading information gives me the satisfaction that I’ve done something useful, but if I do nothing to incorporate this new information into my blogging/webmastering activities, I might as well have read another one of those John Grisham’s legal thrillers.

So here’s the best nugget of advice anyone can ever give you to transform your life: Try all of your ideas, and don’t be afraid of failure, for if there is anything worse than failure, it’s not even trying.

If you are held back by the excuse that you are not yet ready, you’ll never be ready. There’s always more to learn, isn’t it? And what you learn from experience far outweighs what you learn from passively observing. If you want to know how to swim, you’ll have to read the instructions manual. But if you want to swim, you have to take the plunge once!

Shock! Horror! I suddenly stopped ranking for many keywords in Google SERPs.

I noticed yesterday that Google, that had been sending me 200+ visitors daily, started pretending as though I didn’t even exist. I can’t figure out why it happened. Maybe it’s just some algorithmic change and I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill, but it’s equally possible that Google thinks I’m selling text link ads.

I’ve been creating web sites for four years, and I know if a site all of a sudden drops from all its rankings, there’s definitely something wrong.

Many bloggers use Twitter as a platform to promote their own blog. That’s an easy concept, no need to waste our time there. Instead, lets focus on something that is under-utilized by most bloggers: promoting other blogger’s content by “retweeting.”

The art of “retweeting” is best described as taking a twitter message someone else has posted, and rebroadcasting that same message to your followers. When broadcasting this message, you should give credit to the original poster. While retweeting sounds great for the original tweeter (since there is usually a link involved), retweeting can actually benefit you just as much if not more.